Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

Every reader should ask himself periodically “Toward what end, toward what end?”—but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.